Food abundance is level zero

Level zero

I keep calling this level zero because it is not the achievement, it is the baseline a country needs before it can attempt anything else. A person deciding whether to eat today is not in a position to start a business, finish a degree or invent anything.

Zimbabwe has the land and it has the people who know how to farm it. What it does not consistently have is the infrastructure around the farming.

Agriculture is an energy problem in different clothes

Water has to be moved, and pumps need power. Harvests have to be kept, and cold storage needs power. Grain has to be processed, and mills need power. Every one of those is an electrical problem before it is an agricultural one, which is why I work on energy first and keep coming back to this.

I am an electrical engineer, not an agronomist. I am not going to tell a farmer how to farm. My contribution is the layer underneath: the power, pumping, storage and processing that decides whether good farming turns into food on a shelf or a crop that spoils.

The order I would do it in

1. 1

   Water that arrives on time

   Irrigation that doesn't depend on the rain arriving when the calendar says it should.

2. 2

   Storage that stops the loss

   A harvest lost after it was grown is the most expensive kind of failure. Cold and dry storage close that gap.

3. 3

   Processing close to the farm

   Value added near where food is grown keeps the margin in the district instead of exporting it.